Comments on: How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail? The “big questions” and women’s history.http://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/
History and sexual politics, 1492 to the presentSun, 02 Aug 2015 17:42:18 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com/By: Feminist Avatarhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33884
Sun, 16 Mar 2014 01:16:06 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33884I had a different and very rewarding experience as an u/grad in a uni with an unusually high (even now!) number of women’s historians. I almost managed to get a women’s studies degree in a standard history dept. Of 16 upper level modules (3 and 4th year), half were explicitly women’s history topics or feminist politics. And several other courses had women integrated into them. It was very important to my personal development as a scholar, a feminist and a human being to do those courses, and I still think there is an important place for them on the curriculum.

In my current institution, apart from the (small number of) gender historians, gender history tends to still be ‘the token extra’ – the one lecture added onto a course to cover ‘women’s issues’ or the one women’s history module (although this is changing or at least we’re trying to make change happen). So, for this course (which I inherited so had to stick with certain structures), I decided that it was politically important to demonstrate how gender could be integrated into your standard course. It’s perhaps especially important in a small dept where we don’t have a lot of bodies to provide a large variety of courses.

]]>By: Historiannhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33883
Sat, 15 Mar 2014 10:40:53 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33883Twenty years ago, I would have made the argument that Sarah makes: why do we segregate women’s history? Why can’t we teach the kind of courses that Feminist Avatar teaches? Can’t we all just get along? Especially because my earliest published work was on the subject (new at the time) of masculinity, not women. I never took a women’s history course as an undergrad–I just studied what I wanted to and figured that all historical subjects were created equal.

However, within five years I was radicalized by my experience as an employee of a few very different universities, where women scholars were relatively few on the faculty, and where women’s history didn’t exist as an intellectual subject. Colleagues and department chairs said and did things to me that very few young male scholars ever have to put up with. The profession’s failure to integrate scholars with women’s bodies was clear to me in the 90s, as well as the profession’s failure to integrate the insights of women’s and gender history. Indeed, I was witness to its resistance to both projects.

And what I did in my research was even more marginal and less imaginable than an old-fashioned women’s history course. (Gender and warfare? Idiotic! Of course war is about gender–it’s something that’s either so overdetermined we don’t need to talk about it, or of such marginal significance we don’t need to talk about it.)

So, I guess you can say that I was a gender-integrationist historian who was mugged by reality. It’s disillusioning as a junior scholar when you believe in your profession and believe in change over time to be confronted with such stubborn resistance to change. I hope today’s grad students and junior scholars have a very different experience, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

]]>By: Feminist Avatarhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33882
Sat, 15 Mar 2014 02:33:46 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33882Next semester, I’m teaching what is basically a survey of Georgian Britain for 2/3 year u/grads, which ranges from political structures, to economy, to family life, and the MAJORITY of my reading had been written by gender historians (of men as well as women – there is a lot of masculinity stuff in this field). There is enough work on this topic to give them a strong sense of the basic debates in the wider field with a strong gender analysis from the outset. I also tried to include reading on Black and other minority Britons for every topic where it existed, whilst social class is fairly fundamental to the course structure. It wasn’t remotely hard and it didn’t mean giving them inappropriate or ‘marginal’ readings. These were all authors engaging with the main debates in the field. This is not being marketed as a gender course and I’m not planning on discussing gender as a form of analysis; rather I’m just integrating gender into my analysis as if it was a fundamental part of how we understand experience in the past – you know what gender historians have been doing for 50 years now.

I think as a result it’s a really vibrant course and has some of the most cutting edge stuff in the field on it. (Perhaps because it is my area) I also have piles of primary sources that include women and men, were produced by women and men, and very often both together interacting (imagine that!). I’ll be interested to see whether the students notice – that sounds daft, but if we don’t make a fuss will they just assume that it makes sense to study all of the human population? Or whether they see it as a ‘women’s history’ course at the end.

]]>By: Sarahhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33881
Thu, 13 Mar 2014 19:52:55 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33881As I go through my graduate work, I’m having more and more of a problem with “women’s” history. Not only does the focus on “women” reinforce the ahistorical gender binary, but it makes it too easy to slip into “women and other” or “men and other”. To my mind, if you are talking about women’s history, you are inherently talking about men as well because you are singling out women in the context of a female/male binary. I’m all for females as historical subjects, but I’d like to see even more critical engagement with definitions – what does “women” mean, when a historian says women in the context of a piece about reproduction do they really mean people with childbearing capabilities?

It’s unfortunate that “gender history” is at times seen as a cop out of sorts for those wanting to get away from the marginalization of women’s history. However, I think gender history is a much more honest and helpful representation of the work being done.

Also Ann, I was one of the students at the lunch with Nikki at NYU – thanks for coming to talk with us!

]]>By: Mark Petersonhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33879
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 21:04:51 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33879Yes, your recollection of the Huntington symposium sounds exactly right, especially about the Canizares-Sidbury essay. And yet, your work, Juliana Barr’s and Allan Greer’s were all represented there as leading examples of “borderlands” history (or “Territorial Crossings,” as they called it for the symposium). In my own syllabi and grad teaching, I’m not a big fan of labels and gatekeeping across subfields, and I’m not entirely sure i know what the “new imperial history” is — not a phrase I’ve ever used — but I and my colleagues have definitely assigned many of the above titles in Atlantic history, borderlands, slavery, or American Revolution contexts.

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Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:35:17 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33878Right, but do they get assigned as the “new imperial history/AW/borderlands” title in a grad seminar? Or as Melissa notes, are they grouped on the syllabus as women’s & gender history.

This was a HUGE issue (at least, I thought it was an issue) in that 2009 Huntington seminar I was a part of, and which you witnessed from the audience, Mark. I made this point in my comments on Jim Sidbury’s and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s essay on ethnogenisis/creolization, and my comments about “where are the women out of whose bodies this stuff happens?” When the essay was published two years later in the WMQ (April 2011), and one commissioned commenter said this AGAIN, they sheepishly noted in a footnote that I had asked these questions repeatedly in the seminar.

At least, that’s my memory of the seminar: everyone listened to me politely, and then pretty much ignored my ideas for the rest of the weekend.

]]>By: Mark Petersonhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33877
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 17:01:09 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33877I’m inclined to disagree that the “new imperial history” from the Atlantic World/borderlands/North America side is just the old imperial history in new packaging. I’m thinking (off the top of my head) of titles like Sarah Pearsall’s Atlantic Families, Susannah Shaw Romney’s new book on New Netherlands, Heather Kopelson’s Faithful Bodies, soon out from NYU, Jennifer Spear’s Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, Julianna Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborne’s World, Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent, Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies, Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale, and even including the works of some “dudes” like Brett Rushforth’s Bonds of Alliance, Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint, and Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire. This is a pretty impressive list of newer titles that don’t ignore women, avoid gender, or refuse to consider or problematize sexuality, that are pretty big, and have made big impacts on the field.

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Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:19:07 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33876I think my colleagues have generally not known that I teach women’s history (there hasn’t been a lot of curricular integration in the institutions where I’ve taught, and in one case possibly a certain baseline level of hostility to women’s history). It’s only discouraging because it’s a clear sign that male students at those institutions don’t feel like they need women’s history, that it’s not relevant and it can be ignored, that’s all. In one 100% female class, the class was still packed, so it certainly filled a need. I didn’t mean to suggest it’s discouraging to teach women!

]]>By: Historiannhttp://historiann.com/2014/03/07/how-doth-the-little-crocodile-improve-his-shining-tail-the-big-questions-and-womens-history/comment-page-1/#comment-33875
Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:42:14 +0000http://www.historiann.com/?p=22477#comment-33875Perpetua: I share your goal of integration. (I don’t even sneak in the women’s history–I just do it right there in broad daylight, make them read primary and secondary sources about women, and make them write about it in their assignments.)

I’ve never had your experience of teaching women-only women’s history courses. I always get several men in my American women’s history to 1800 and in the history of sexuality in America course I teach with Ruth Alexander. That said, I don’t know why it would be discouraging to teach an all-woman class. It seems like you’d still be serving a need, and we don’t need male students to ratify the legitimacy of our teaching fields, do we?

I don’t know why you didn’t get men in your classes–I’m sure institutional culture has something to do with it. I’m fortunate to have a lot of supportive colleagues in key decision-making roles. I’m perceived as a leader among my colleagues in both graduate and undergraduate education, and I think they steer strong students my way. It would be very undermining f you didn’t have colleagues who recommended your courses and supported student interest in them.